I recently ran out of storage and decided to upgrade by buying an M.2 SSD (Lexar NM790) for my MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX motherboard. However, it seems my motherboard isn't recognizing the SSD at all. I've done some troubleshooting, but nothing has worked. Before I rush to buy a new motherboard, I came across PCIe adapters that would be less expensive and easier to deal with. I know I need an NVMe supported adapter and not a SATA one. My motherboard supports PCIe 2.0 x16, but I'm unsure if that's enough. What should I look for when purchasing a PCIe SSD adapter, and can my motherboard sufficiently support one? Thank you all in advance!
1 Answer
It sounds like your M.2 slot should support the drive, but if it's not appearing in Disk Management, you might not have initialized it yet. Using a PCIe adapter won’t fix that if the issue is with the drive or your BIOS settings. Keep in mind that since you're using a Gen4 drive, it'll only run at half its speed on a Gen3 M.2 slot. Plus, if you use an adapter in a Gen2 slot, you'll see a major drop in speed as well.
I get that, but my drive isn't showing in the BIOS either, and I’ve heard of others having similar issues with this board. At least getting 25% of the speed is better than what I have now with my other SSD, especially for gaming.